You are reading

We are delighted to announce the latest book by our former (and founding) MFA Creative Nonfiction faculty Leslie Leyland Fields!

Hooked!: True Stories of Obsession, Love, and Death from Alaska’s Commercial Fishermen and Women was released September 1 by Epicenter Press.

In her introduction, Fields writes, “It does not require flights of imagination or verbal high jinks to create from such a setting and occupation the necessary elements of story: plot, conflict, tension, drama, and tragedy. All of this is built into the business of commercial fishing.”

Hooked! certainly involves those things: hard deaths, sea stories, the battle to draw up a wage from the deep. But it also transcends those thrills. Written by sixteen fisher-writers who have experienced this uncommon occupation firsthand, these stories flesh out the life of the commercial fisher; they include, as Fields writes, “not just the dying, but the living; not just the obsessive doing of fishing, but the passionate being as well.”